Posted
by
samzenpuson Friday January 31, 2014 @06:27AM
from the time-to-play dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes: "It's no secret that Nintendo faces significant challenges: revenues are down, rival platforms such as Microsoft's Xbox One and Sony's PlayStation 4 are attracting a lot of buzz, and iOS and Android have made significant inroads into mobile gaming. Rather than double down on its core business, however, Nintendo reportedly sees its salvation in new, nongaming segments such as... monitoring your health? 'We have now redefined entertainment to mean making it fun for people to improve the quality of their lives,' Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata told a company strategy meeting, according to The Wall Street Journal. But he refused to part with more detail about Nintendo's plans, except to claim that whatever's in the works isn't a wearable device along the lines of Nike's FuelBand or the FitBit, and it isn't an iteration of the Wii Balance Board, an accessory that measures the user's weight and center of balance while playing games."

Nintendo seems intent on being dragged kicking and screaming into the modern gaming age. They don't seem to put out any hardware that doesn't produce huge margins (which is why their consoles always seem to trail in technical performance). It feels like the Sega story, Nintendo needs to make sure they don't put out a Dreamcast at the wrong time (and I say this as a Dreamcast lover, still have mine in my office.) I think there's space for three console manufacturers in the market, but at this point they're pretty going to need to put out somewhat comparable products. Putting out another low-powered Wii that people flocked to, played for two weeks, and then let collect dust? Yeah, that's not going to work this time.

Still not quite on the money. They fucked up, yes, but it has nothing to do with where they positioned the console on price and performance. Their main issue, which has been an issue for every single Nintendo console since the SNES, is the timing of their first party games, combined with their third party developer support. Nintendo has a history of weak third party releases, with games that aren't quite up to par on their console and general lack of releases, which means they rely heavily on first party development. However, where's the first party support for WiiU? It was there for Wii and heavily pushed consoles out the door, it was there for the 3DS and outright saved the console, and on and on. On WiiU, excluding remakes like Winwaker HD, they're lacking games from many of their major franchises right now, with no release dates in sight. There's no Mario Kart, no (new) Zelda, no new Metroid, no new Donkey Kong, no new Smash Bros., no Pokemon, and I could rattle off many more franchises that just don't have games for the new console, and don't have any announced entries with a release date to fill the void. Nintendo has this terrible habit of releasing a console with weak first party support when that's what sustains their entire business model, and with WiiU, the future doesn't look bright specifically because of their lack of announced titles with release dates.

Given all this news about Nintendo lately, I bet their stock is tanking. If I knew there was a Pokemon coming in the next year, I'd buy as much stock as I could, because everyone knows that Pokemon alone outright sells consoles.